Detained U.S. Citizen to Face Verdict in N. Korean Court

April 28 (Bloomberg) -- North Korea said it will hand down
a verdict on a detained American citizen accused of crimes
against the state, the communist country’s official Korean
Central News Agency reported yesterday.

Pae Jun Ho, who entered North Korea’s Rason City on Nov. 3
as a tourist, will face judgment in the Supreme Court after
admitting to the charges, KCNA said, without citing a source.
Pae was involved with a Protestant Christian religious movement,
according to a Dec. 11 CNN report that identified him as Kenneth
Bae.

The State Department is aware of the reports a U.S. citizen
will face trial in North Korea, department spokeswoman Jen Psaki
said in an e-mail. The State Department will work closely with
representatives of the Embassy of Sweden in Pyongyang, which
visited the U.S. citizen last week. A delegation that included
former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson failed during its
visit to North Korea in January to secure Pae’s release.

“In the process of investigation, he admitted that he
committed crimes aimed to topple the DPRK with hostility toward
it,” the KCNA report said, referring to the country’s official
name Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Nuclear Threat

The Korean peninsula has been on edge since February, when
Kim Jong Un’s regime detonated an atomic bomb in defiance of
United Nations sanctions and then threatened preemptive nuclear
strikes against its enemies. The Obama administration has
rejected claims North Korea possesses the ability to launch
nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.

“North Korea wants an excuse to have talks with the
U.S.,” Park Joon Young, a professor of international relations
at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, said by phone today. The
threat to hand down a verdict on Pae “will be used to make a
deal with the U.S. in return for releasing him.”

Workers Withdrawn

The KCNA report came as South Korea began withdrawing its
citizens from a jointly run industrial park in North Korea. The
North on April 8 recalled its workers from the Gaeseong
industrial zone, the last point of inter-Korean exchange and an
important cash source for the impoverished nation.

Several U.S. citizens have been detained in recent years in
North Korea. All of them have been released after negotiations.
Eddie Jun, a Korean-American missionary, was released in 2011
after being detained for half a year for proselytizing,
according to the Associated Press. In February 2010, North Korea
released an American missionary, Robert Park, after he was held
for about two months.

North Korea’s latest action on Pae is “part of their
typical behavior to flag their existence in the global
society,” Park said.

South Korea’s Foreign Minister Yun Byung Se met Chinese
counterpart Wang Yi on April 24 in Beijing to pave the way for
the start of three-way “strategic dialogue” with the U.S.,
South Korean ministry spokesman Cho Tai Young said.